i’ll be your vital clearing

aw thank you for checking in on my blog!! nope, i’m still on here and on twitter @ / sentientsea, just been busy with grad school the last few years so i haven’t been sharing my creative work as regularly anymore. you can find a list of my published pieces on my website here, i usually cross-post to tumblr but sometimes do forget! anyway will try to post a bit more often here going forward <3

Amrita Chakraborty

Amrita Chakraborty

While walking back from the library, I pass a cream-colored house with a plastic lion in the front yard. The lion is very obviously fake— its face misshapen, color a dull brown, no artistic detailing at all— but it is the size of a large dog, & sits patiently at the left corner of the yard, half hidden by the bushes. Perhaps because of its size or its posture, despite the lion’s plasticity, I startle as I walk past it, my peripheral vision picking up this false predator & giving it life. As I turn to it and then away, smiling at my own mistake, I wonder if I actually mistook it for a dog, or some animal more likely to be sitting so authoritatively in the front yard of a house in queens. But the more I think on it, the less true this seems. No— for that second, for my brain & the jolt of surprise-terror-awe in my chest— the lion was as real as anything in that subdued landscape. It laid claim to my response, insinuating its own reality into mine. Misshapen & discolored & alive, it watched me walk away.

june 9th, @nosebleedclub

Amrita Chakraborty, published in Voicemail Poems.

"veneer" by amrita chakraborty, published in indigo literary journal